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A Tour of the Yiddish Book Center (Virtual)

Take a virtual tour of the world's first Yiddish museum.

Part of the library's "Stories of Exile" series.

Join Jennifer Young, Education Program Manager at the Yiddish Book Center, as she guides us through a virtual tour of the Center, its collections, and exhibits, and initiatives. The million books recovered by the Yiddish Book Center represent Jews’ first sustained literary and cultural encounter with the modern world. They are a window on the past thousand years of Jewish history, a precursor of modern Jewish writing in English, Hebrew and other languages, and a springboard for new creativity. Since its founding in 1980, The Yiddish book center has launched a wide range of bibliographic, educational, and cultural programs to share these treasures with the wider world.

This program is part of the library's "Stories of Exile" series taking place this fall. This series is the result of a grant awarded to Wilmette Public Library and twenty-seven other libraries around the country by the Yiddish Book Center. The Yiddish Book Center is a nonprofit organization working to recover, celebrate, and regenerate Yiddish and modern Jewish literature and culture. With this series, the Center hopes to use Yiddish literature as a lens to reflect upon the experience of exile, displacement, and migration shared across cultures and throughout history.

Jennifer Young is currently the Education Program Manager at the Yiddish Book Center. Jennifer served as the Director of Education at the YIVO Institute, where she also worked as Digital Learning Curator to produce YIVO's first online class, Discovering Ashkenaz. She has also worked at the Tenement Museum, the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, and the New-York Historical Society. Jennifer received a B.A. in Anthropology and Jewish Studies from McGill University, and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois. After completing doctoral studies in Jewish history at NYU, she received an M.Ed in Museum Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. She also serves as part of a scholars' working group dedicated to research and scholarship of the Yiddish Left, sponsored by Cornell University.

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